Shooting at Oxnard party kills Camarillo teen; 2 wounded

A 16-year-old Camarillo boy was shot and killed early Saturday morning and two other people were wounded in an apparently unprovoked attack at an Oxnard house party, police said.

Vicente Arzate Jr., a Camarillo High School junior, was pronounced dead at 12:40 a.m. An autopsy showed that he died of a gunshot to the head, according to the Ventura County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office.

Arzate and perhaps as many as two dozen others were at a party in a town house on the 700 block of Rialto Street, south of Oxnard Airport, when the shooting occurred.

“He was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said his father, Vicente Arzate Sr., of Oxnard.

He said his son was an excellent student, had never been in trouble, and hoped to attend Ventura College before transferring to another college or university to study engineering.

Still in shock about the shooting, Arzate said on Saturday afternoon that his son had spent the previous day with his mother at her home in Camarillo before going to the party.

Police spent hours talking to neighbors Saturday and walked through the Oxnard home and yard searching for evidence. Neighbors said they heard three shots around midnight.

“My next-door neighbors are in the military, so they could tell it was close,” said Anthony Barreto, who lives across from the crime scene. The neighborhood, right next to the gated Pacific Breeze community, is relatively safe, Barreto said.

“We all talk to each other and watch the street. There hasn’t been any problems here like this before,” he said.

Three or four college-age men were renting the town home where the shooting occurred, according to neighbors. But the men had packed up their belongings and were getting ready to move. On Saturday, the home was almost empty.

One neighbor said she’d been told that a group of men had knocked on the door and when the door was opened, one of them started shooting. Others reported seeing a gang graffiti “tag” painted on the home, but that was not apparent at midday Saturday.

Police would not confirm or deny those reports.

Officers arrived about 12:25 a.m. and found Arzate dead inside the home. They found the two other victims who had been wounded, an 18-year-old female and 22-year-old male, both from Oxnard.

All three victims were standing just inside the entryway of the home when they were hit by gunshots fired through the front door. Others at the party started running out of the back of the house and jumping over fences to get away.

Two doors away, Cesar Escueda and his wife, Alissa Castillo, were at home and heard the gunshots. Their two girls, Paulina, 7, and Dolly, 3, were asleep.

“We heard the shots and then we started hearing all this banging on the door,” said Escueda, 32.

The partygoers had jumped the fence separating the properties and were looking for a place to hide, he said. One was a girl whose forehead had been grazed by a bullet, he said.

The partygoers cowered in his home while he called police, Escueda said. Worried that the gunman might be coming and fearing for the safety of his two daughters, Escueda said he and his wife decided to lock the door and wait for police.

“Kids kept knocking but I didn’t want to open the door. My girls were upstairs,” he said.

Oxnard police investigators ask anyone with information related to the shooting to contact Detective Jeff Kay at 385-8174 or leave a message on the Violent Crimes Hotline at 982-7070.